We came back to the UK to be near family for what we thought would be a few weeks. It turned into four months, and they were hard ones.
At one point I put an advert on Facebook asking whether anyone fancied swapping homes for the summer. Nobody did — not because people weren’t willing, but because a straight swap only works if one family happens to want your city on exactly the dates you want theirs. That almost never happens.
That is the whole reason nights exist here. You lend your home to one family and stay in another family’s, somewhere else entirely. The dates never have to line up, and the two families never have to be the same.
A friend is in that position now, which is why I’ve kept going. Plenty of people have the niyyah to make hijrah. What stops them usually isn’t the intention — it’s a year’s lease, a deposit, a guarantor and a school place, all needed at once, from a country you haven’t arrived in yet.
Someone told me recently that they couldn’t afford to make hijrah. I don’t think the cost was ever really the house. It was the way housing works. That part we can change.
Allah makes a way for the one who goes for His sake.
Sometimes the way is another family’s empty house.